Russia’s Disinformation War Is Just Getting Started
Credit to Author: Paris Martineau| Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2019 00:28:03 +0000
The Internet Research Agency specifically targeted African Americans, and has not stopped trying to influence elections, a Senate intelligence report says.
The disinformation wars are only just getting started, warns a new report on Russian social media interference released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Published Tuesday, the report offers the most comprehensive look at the efforts of the now-infamous Russian propaganda factory known as the Internet Research Agency to divide Americans, undermine public faith in the democratic process, and aggressively support then-candidate Donald Trump before and after the 2016 election. In addition to affirming much of what had been reported about Russian online interference over the past three years—including in Robert Mueller's sweeping indictment of the IRA in February 2018—the report offers a comprehensive look at the extent of past foreign influence operations and recommendations on how best to prepare for those yet to come.
It's the second volume to come out of the Senate Intel Committee, though this one is "much more detailed in its analysis, meticulously cited, and concerned with influence and impact,” says Columbia University researcher Jonathan Albright, who first exposed the extent of some of the IRA's efforts. “The conclusions in the second volume are notably bolder and unequivocal in supporting academic research and the advisory groups' findings. It reads like a different report altogether."
Here are the highlights:
The Russian campaign was way more complicated than first understood
Russia’s attempt to exert influence over the 2016 election was far from an isolated incident tied to one campaign, but one part of a “broader, sophisticated, and ongoing information warfare campaign” designed to divide America by inflaming cultural, political, and social tensions. The influence operations began long before 2016 and remain active today, the report says.
The report says that although the IRA’s purchase of online ads on platforms like Facebook received considerable attention from the press and the public, the ads really weren’t all that important. The number of ads Russian operatives bought and used to target American users paled in comparison to the tweets, YouTube videos, Reddit comments, and Facebook and Instagram posts created and shared by IRA operatives posing as normal users. The group made over 61,500 Facebook posts, 116,000 Instagram posts, and 10.4 million tweets, all aimed at sowing discord and inflaming tensions among Americans, says the report.
More than any other group, the IRA aggressively targeted black Americans on every social media platform before and after the 2016 election. More than 95 percent of the content the IRA uploaded to YouTube focused on “racial issues and police brutality,” the report notes, and five of the top 10 IRA accounts on Instagram targeted “African-American issues and audiences.”
The report notes that “numerous high-profile” Americans, including Trump campaign aide Roger Stone, former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and Fox News host Sean Hannity, “unwittingly spread IRA content by liking IRA tweets or engaging with other IRA social media content, enhancing the potential audience for IRA content by millions of Americans.”
It’s far from over
IRA activity ramped up following the 2016 election, shows no signs of stopping come next year. To combat current and future threats, the report recommends a multi-pronged approach requiring coordination among Congress, social media companies, and the president, despite ongoing hostilities.
The report throws some shade at social media companies, who it says must work with each other to better understand the techniques being used by disinformation mongers, their own vulnerabilities, and best practices. Companies already share some of this information—a relationship credited as aiding in the cross-platform identification of so-called “bad actors” in press releases from Twitter and Facebook—but the report says they don’t go far enough.
The committee describes the current information sharing setup as far too informal, and inspired mostly by its own previous requests. “This should not be a difficult step,” the report says, noting that companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft are already engaged in more extensive information-sharing arrangements to flag and remove terrorist and other violent extremist videos.
The report also says the tech companies have not shared enough information about online influence operations with users who were or might be exposed, making it harder for users to educate themselves about disinformation and how best to avoid it. The report urges social media companies to be more transparent with users about malicious activity on their platforms—including disclosing when a user is a bot—and to tell users more about why they are seeing certain types of content, and where it came from. The platforms also should more clearly and quickly notify users that have been exposed to manipulated content, the report says.
The committee chastises social media companies for being stingy with information on how foreign actors manipulated their platforms. It asks companies to be more open to working with outside researchers and academics to develop strategies to defend against future attacks, and to share the results of any collaboration with affected users.
In a recommendation that may not sit well in Silicon Valley, the report calls on lawmakers to consider making it easier for law enforcement and other government agencies to get information from social media companies, including examining laws and other legal constraints that may impede the information gathering process.
“[Twitter has] made significant progress since the 2016 US election to address, mitigate, and prevent future attempts to undermine the integrity of online conversation regarding elections and the democratic process,” a Twitter spokesperson told WIRED Tuesday. Twitter said it created the first, and what it said is the largest, archive of information operations removed from the service.
“Any act of foreign interference in our elections violates our values,” a Facebook spokesperson said in response to questions about the committee’s recommendations. “That’s why we have stepped up our efforts to build strong defenses on multiple fronts. We’re working closely with governments, outside experts and other companies to identify threats and share information.”
The report also recommends that President Trump should, among other things, “reinforce with the public the danger of attempted foreign interference in the 2020 election.” Though the administration’s current track record on the subject may pose some challenges.